Gents, I was wondering which .dll''s everyone ships with their games, and which do you rely on the user already having on his machine? I don''t use MFC so I''m not worried about those, and I think DirectX is pretty straight forward if you just call the DirectX installer when DirectX is not detected. But for standard Windows .dll''s, which do you ship with the game and where does your install put them? On the hard drive or CD? In the directory with the executable or installed to the Windows system directory? I understand that it is fairly dangerous to install to the system directory and that this should usually be avoided. I ask because I seem to get varying problems with certain .dll''s whenever I try loading and playing my game on other machines. When installing to a laptop under Win 2000 for example, the game blows up saying there is a problem with KERNEL32.DLL. I don''t see this problem on my other test machines. Does this mean that I should ship a version of this .dll with my game? I intend to test the crap out of it on many machines, but it would be nice to at least start out with a semi-intelligent installation scheme. Thanks in advance, Mark Temple Enemy Technology "We have found the enemy, and he is us!"

I''ll freely admit that I''ve never built an install for a piece of game software, but I''ve built a ton of them for other purposes. You don''t want to ship kernal32.dll with your install since that''s a major system component. Perhaps the laptop needs one of the service packs for Win2K that''s been released (fairly) recently?

Installs are sticky, painful things that take a long time to debug. Good luck.